rob mclennan's the book of sentences

Reviewed by ​Jérôme Melançon 

(University of Calgary Press, 2025)

​A simple collection, years in the making and in the submitting. rob mclennan, himself a notable and experienced publisher, has talked publicly about the endless and discouraging and necessary process of finding the appropriate and willing producer and distributor of pages and ink. For us at least, it was worth his wait.
 
Time passes within this collection. One section of previously-scattered and now-collected poems from various journals named for their publication venue, one section of poems that follows the timeline of the Covid-19 pandemic. Events private and common, known to his readers, some also present in the book of smaller, some discussed on social media. Days, moments, pauses. In places physical and virtual that are laid down upon the page in the same movements, inseparable. There is no cartography for this history, no chronology, no clocks, no calendars. Time is lived, not measured. There is more than one birthday; the Covid-19 pandemic keeps interjecting; people, poets, keep dying, a father dies, but others have already passed. A fish is replaced in title before it dies in the poem.
 
In the middle of these events, mclennan cultivates the art of surprise, the line that brings an end to narration, the citation that collapses the poem, the book, into other people’s poems and books that precede them and seem now to have contained part of them.
 
His allusions to writers send us back to our past readings, out to the books we might now want to pick up, hoping to glimpse something. Or, since most people simply can’t read as much as mclennan, they leave us wondering, agnostic as to the complete meaning of the allusion, knowing that under this aspect the only difference between these poems and any other we might read is that he tells us about more of the poets who accompany his writing. And these poets accompany him like his friends and family, as if they interjected, interrupted, called out to him from outside the poem:

​“To paraphrase John Newlove: In this cold room, / smeared // with human nature.”
 
“André du Bouchet: I will repeat myself / like earth you tread.”
 
“Nathanaël: The word / precedes the body.”
 
“As Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes: What ignorance / can her description eliminate?”

​There is mystery in these almost-quotations, these barely-more-than allusions. These references act as modifiers for atmosphere and direction in the poem, making it clear that although the direction does not change, the road travelled was other than what we might have assumed. This mystery, this sudden shift in previous direction, this action at a distance through time is just as present in lines that might be more fully his own. And the poet and speaker are just as present in the poem as the reader, teetering as we are on the border of presence and absence from the book, as in these three examples:

​“Where my limbs meet yours, a poem / as dense // as a brick.”
 
“Some days, existing as a human is hard. Today / I am a bird.”
 
“To include everyone, one must leave behind / this entire world.”

​The poet weighs the alternatives, flees into those possibilities he creates, stops before reaching the ever-elusive conclusion.
 
In this collection we find mclennan’s usual voice and style, of course; the man is patient and constant, dependable. Also in his craft, in its evolution from book to book, which brings him to new ways of phrasing. The writing here is so incredibly intentional, each sentence uttered as a sentence – even the one-word sentence feels full – and each is a pronouncement on being, as massive and light and reversible as being itself. His work on the sentence is ever more precise. Take this poem from the suite “Three poems for Tiny Spoon”:

​An immortal
 
stillness, gathers. Somewhere, light is filtered. Somewhere,
a thin form, mostly paper, melts
 
beyond the snowy limbs.

​The stillness is even greater for being preceded by such a pause, gathers more forcefully and intentionally for being separated by a comma. In a retrospective effect, the comma preceding “gathers” makes the “stillness” seem like a verb, rendering it more active, and gives the “immortal” the appearance and stability of a noun which then competes with the actual noun in the sentence. The second sentence takes on a more traditional form – but lets any possible precision go by favouring allusiveness in relation to place, form of light, and kind of filter. The third sentence establishes the theme of the poem – page and snow becoming one, perception being transformed through an overabundance of light, with emphasis on the becoming, because each item and each of its states (thin, paper, melt, snow) remains discrete, separated by commas and space, attention turning to only one of them at a time. Space is stretched by the space, then stretched some more by “beyond” and by the change in rhythm, the elongation of the phrasing.
 
This work on the sentence is also within the sentence, within the poem. mclennan speaks of commas and periods, of the pause in the sentence. “Surviving, cottage” has descriptions of punctuation. “Quarantine, in perpetua” describes writing. “Composition” as well. There he speaks of lines and the role of partition and separation:

​This line
How language holds    each fissure. How
the clouds part.

​The pause becomes a sentence. The pandemic appears, is unveiled fully, as a pause, and a sentence – a death sentence for many. Whole poems are included between empty brackets, where words, someone, ought to be; poems that are absent, almost entirely shapeless. But the pandemic remains only a pause, and there is a return to the world. We see mclennan and his family, and their friends, exit the pandemic knowingly, returning to the world – yes, but to what world? One of disasters, of fires. One where fish die – and where children learn to take care of new ones.

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​Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK.
His fourth poetry collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. He has also published three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.